FBI: If We Told You, You Might Sue
The government doesn’t want you to know whether your internet or phone company is cooperating with its dragnet surveillance program because you might get upset and file lawsuits asserting your constitutional rights.
In Fifty Days, Payments Innovation Will Stop In Silicon Valley
What the law accomplishes sounds mundane enough: it requires money transmitters–companies that act like banks, but aren’t, such as PayPal–to get licenses. As usual, however, the devil is in the details. Previously, California corporations were only required to get money transmitter licenses for international funds transfers, and domestic transfers were unregulated. Now both kinds of transfers are regulated. Also, the price of each license is a little bit steep: half a million dollars and change.
Oh, and if you want to do business nationwide, you’ll need 43 more of those licenses from almost every state. The forms and requirements are different everywhere, most states want your fingerprints to do a criminal background check (the exact same criminal background check, it turns out), and the price varies wildly from a measly $10,000 to $1,000,000+ per state. Want the forms? Good luck finding them; some states don’t post them on-line.
Mike Cane’s xBlog 